The Inconsistent Miss Congeniality Has Glimmers Of Real Creativity And Laughs

To follow the trajectory of Sandra Bullock's career is to see a fascinating career path that, with the benefit of hindsight, really does just exemplify longevity. Bullock garnered large amounts of fame in the 90's, thanks to Speed and While You Were Sleeping kicking her career into overdrive and she maintained that star wattage through the next two decades of her career, with the only real bump in her career coming in the 2006-2007 era where she just had some mild box office underperformers. Right after that though, the 2009 double-whammy of The Proposal and The Blind Side took her to the next level of stardom that she's been riding ever since. Nine years prior to those two movies though, Bullock starred in one of her most famous motion pictures, the comedy Miss Congeniality.


The lead character of this motion picture from 2000 is FBI Agent Gracie Hart (Sandra Bullock), whose overzealous nature tends to get her into more trouble than success in her FBI missions, getting her on the bad side of her superior officer, Harry McDonald (Ernie Hudson), who has suspended her after her actions ensured a mission went awry. However, at the same time, Hart's co-worker Eric Matthews (Benjamin Bratt) is working on a case regarding a bunch of serial killings, the next of which will apparently occur at a beauty pageant in Texas. In order to take down the killer, they're gonna need someone in the FBI to go undercover into the pageant and keep an eye on things.

Who gets chosen for this assignment? Wouldn't you know it, Gracie Hart! Despite being more casual in her appearance and manners, with a little help from pageantry expert Victor Melling (Michael Caine), she's soon ready to go undercover as Mrs. New Jersey and try to help her FBI cohorts thwart a potential murder. Of course, Gracie is not a fan of the pageantry scene one bit, especially the daunting dietary restrictions she must abide be, so the experience of actually living as a pageant contestant for an extended period of time is gonna be trying for her. But if she can make it through, she may just solve this case and even make some new friends in the process.

Miss Congeniality is one of those movies that definitely gets better as it goes along, which is really good since the first act or so is borderline dismal in terms of just how many jokes fail to make their mark. The gags too often come across as being too similar to jokes in other comedies, leaving many intended gut-buster moments just coming across as broad and obvious instead of uproarious. Lacking distinctive jokes to its name, it doesn't really begin to pick up until Michael Caine enters the movie. Caine's deadpan reactions Bullock's more au natural personality makes for a lot of fun comedic moments and the two actors bounce off each other in a notably entertaining way.

Thankfully, once we get to the pageantry-set sequences, a more consistently diverting atmosphere emerges even when Michael Caine is off-screen and I'm not just saying that because they drop an ABBA song in there (though that certainly doesn't hurt!). Gracie's budding friendship with Cheryl "Mrs. Rhode Island" Frasier (Heather Burns) is sweet, for instance, and Bullock's comedic timing reacting to her struggles to fit into the beauty pageant scene makes for some well-done humor. A romantic subplot that develops between Grace and Eric steers the movie down the road of rote storytelling once again, though, especially since Bullock and Bratt don't have the best chemistry in their scenes together.

That over-reliance on the tired and familiar really hurts Miss Congeniality, a movie whose best moments suggest a more original and consistently funny movie. As it stands, it's merely an overall OK film that starts out really poorly before evolving into something that's frequently funny but still suffering from an overdose of uninspired plot details. The more generic direction from director Donald Petrie can't stave away the more uninventive ambiance that permeates Miss Congeniality, though, to be fair, lead actor Sandra Bullock does bring some unique charms to her lead role that remind ya why she's stuck around for so long as a noteworthy Hollywood leading lady.